Verified: Kundra Did Receive an M.S. in Information Systems Management

When in doubt, always remember that John C. Dvorak is a complete jackass.

This is why professional journalists <i>actually pick up the phone and call people</i> before publishing accusations about them. And this is also why bloggers and "online columnists" are often not considered real journalists.

(repost from other thread)<p>Dvorak called the University of Maryland, College Park and they said they had no record of him receiving a degree at there, which is what everyone things of when they read University of Maryland. NextGov confirmed he has an MS at UMUC, which might have a shared history with UMD, but only UMD is allowed to be known as the University of Maryland.<p>This is so obviously a non-story, or at least not worth more than a short, transparency inspired blog post. Of all Dvoraks bonehead stories, this one takes the cake.<p>Still, I'd like to see Kundra's bio updated to reflect the actual university he received that degree from. I would never say I received an MS from the University of Texas, when in fact I received one from some other UT system school, and certainly wouldn't phrase it that way on my .gov bio page.

Sorry to ask the obvious question, but who cares? IS Programs (even the top ones) aren't the most rigorous things in the world. Anyone who is in a CIO type position should probably have real world experience, professional degrees be damned. Why aren't we talking about that instead?

The shocking thing to me was that<p>1) People trusted a random blogger over people getting paid full time to vet people. Understandably vetters miss things such as taxes (complicated) or illegal immigrant maids (hidden), but something as simple as a degree will get checked.<p>2) Dvorak didn't call all the campuses, there are multiple UMD campuses just like there are multiple Penn State campuses etc.<p>3) Dvorak trusted it based on the sole person he talked to. Does the school even have the obligation to tell a complete stranger these things? Did he try and find people who knew Dvorak in college? Did he find anyone but himself who thought to the contrary? Everyone has enemies, when you get thrust into public office they come out posting stuff against you, if you had skipped college someone would know.<p>4) Dvorak's question about teaching was trying to slide tense under the radar. He asked if Kundra was a professor. The person he talked to said no. That person was probably just an operator with a directory of proffessor RIGHT NOW. How did he know they looked at a list with every person who ever gave a lecture at UMD?

University of Maryland University College is not exactly the same as the University of Maryland. It's their adult continuing education program basically.

The fact that this is even a story is pretty distressing. As far as I can tell, the guy's gotten good results, which is much more than I can say for plenty of "qualified" people in Washington.

In any case it is fair to raise those questions. Government should be ready answer to public scrutiny. If there are good answers for them: Good.

I'm going to side with Dvorak here. "University of Maryland, University College" is a correspondence school. These days they also have online classes of course. They offer only nontechnical majors, including Information Systems Management (they do not offer CS, Math, Physics, etc). I believe many of the courses at UMUC aren't even accepted as transfer credits to the University of Maryland.<p>The bottom line is that everyone who has gone to school at a state school in maryland knows that "University of Maryland" == "College Park". To list UMD as where you got your degree when you went to UMUC is both technically incorrect, and intentionally misleading.

But where's his birth certificate?!